


Calling in Past Debts

by ilostmyshoe



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Season/Series 01, Season/Series 08, Spn Fan Fiction Challenge, Time Travel, Trials
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-05
Updated: 2014-01-05
Packaged: 2018-01-07 02:09:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1114274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilostmyshoe/pseuds/ilostmyshoe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the prompt: "A spell gone wrong causes season8!Dean to be stuck with season1!Sam and vice-versa."</p>
<p>Dean accidentally stumbled across the spell in the Men of Letters Library. At first he dismissed the idea because, well, who wants to mess with spells and witches and all of that fucked-up magic stuff anyway? But he couldn’t get it out of his mind, and at last he went back and read through it with painstaking care. Because of course the inevitable answer to “Who would want to mess with that stuff?” would always be “The Winchesters once they get desperate enough.” And with Sam’s body disintegrating and no clues about the third trial or Kevin’s location, Dean was plenty desperate.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Calling in Past Debts

Dean accidentally stumbled across the spell in the Men of Letters Library. At first he dismissed the idea because, well, who wants to mess with spells and witches and all of that fucked-up magic stuff anyway? But he couldn’t get it out of his mind, and at last he went back and read through it with painstaking care. Because of course the inevitable answer to “Who would want to mess with that stuff?” would always be “The Winchesters once they get desperate enough.” And with Sam’s body disintegrating and no clues about the third trial or Kevin’s location, Dean was plenty desperate.

Naturally, Sam put up a token resistance. “Dude. A spell? Really?”

“Come on, Sam. It’ll be fine. It’s not like it’s dark magic. Just look at these ingredients; no viscera or animal parts of any kind.”

“And you’re sure the incantation doesn’t, like, bind or indebt us to a demon, god, and/or angel?”

“Positive. I triple checked. It’s all good. And it’s worth it if it makes you better.”

Sam glared at him. “Being sick is a side effect of the trials, Dean. It’s fine. I can handle it.”

“Yeah. Right. I know you can. This is just . . . a little energy bump, so you can push to the finish line on some good, old research. You know, ‘Super Geek-boy to the rescue!’ and all that.”

“Fine. Whatever. Just don’t blame me when it all goes to hell.” Sam grimaced as an intense coughing spell wracked his body.

*   *   *   *   *

Sam was still skeptical as he knelt in the center of the complicated sigil that they had painted on the floor. He lit the ingredients in the copper bowl and began to awkwardly read aloud from the book in his hands:

“ _Nigbati mo je odo Mo ní agbara ati ilera._   
_Bayi mo nilo pe agbara lẹẹkansi._   
_Bayi ara mi ni aisan ati ki o lagbara._

He interrupted himself with a new round of coughing. Dean started to go to help his brother, but Sam shook his head and raised his hand, reminding Dean that another person stepping into the sigil might disrupt the spell. Sam braced himself and continued:

_"Bayi mo nilo pe agbara lẹẹkansi._   
_Jẹ mi yawo lati kọja._   
_Ṣe awọn isowo. Ṣe awọn isowo. Ṣe awọn isowo.*”_

Mystical blue energies swirled around Sam and then began flowing through him. His body shook uncontrollably, and his mouth opened in a silent scream.

“Oh, fuck it.” Dean threw himself at his younger brother. As he entered the spell’s radius there was a flash of blinding, white light.

*   *   *   *   *

Dean landed sprawled on top of his younger brother, a brother who was suddenly much, much, younger than he should be.

“What the hell?” Dean rolled off of Sam and looked around. Instead of the MOL library he was in a nondescript hotel room. Sam was still lying on the floor, staring up at Dean through bangs he hadn’t had in almost a decade.

“Dean!?! Is that you? What happened?” Sam scrambled to his feet, but then doubled over coughing. Dean ran to wrap his arms around his brother and guide him to a seat on the bed. He made soothing noises and rubbed Sam’s back until the coughing eased.

“Dean? What’s going on?” Sam’s voice was a raspy whisper. There was blood on his lips and panic in his eyes.

“I don’t know Sam. But I’ll figure it out. Everything’s going to be okay. I promise.”

*   *   *   *   *

Dean landed sprawled on top of his younger brother, and Sam shoved him off unceremoniously.

“God, Dean, I told you to stay out of the spell radius. This was your stupid idea in the first place, so if you fucked it up don’t. . . bitch . . . to . . . me?” His frustrated tirade ground to a halt as his brain tried to process the brother he saw in front of him. Dean’s eyes were wide, without the familiar laugh lines in the corners. His shoulders were narrower, and his body was almost slender under his heavy leather jacket. Sam had never thought this about his brother before, but Dean actually looked _small_. He looked, well, _young_. While Sam was busy staring, Dean pulled out a gun and aimed it right between Sam’s eyes.

“Look, man. I don’t know what the fuck just happened, where we are, or how you know my name, but you better take me back to my brother right _the fuck_ now.”

“Whoa. Dean. Calm down. I know this sounds crazy, but I _am_ Sam. Honest. I’m not 100% sure, but I think you’ve time traveled here from the past. What’s the last thing you remember?”

Dean took a moment to consider the question, but kept his gun trained on Sam.

“We’d just killed that damn shtriga and were holed up in the motel figuring out our next move. Your turn. How do I know you’re really Sam?”

“Um . . . well . . . the shtriga case. That was the second time you’d faced that monster, right? The first happened when we were kids. You felt bad that we had to use that kid as bait, because when Dad did the same thing it almost got me killed.”

“It wasn’t Dad’s . . . Whatever. Fine. I guess you’re probably Sam.” He lowered his gun and engaged the safety. “So. Time travel, huh? That’s a new one.”

*   *   *   *   *

Young Sam’s coughing had calmed down, but his temperature had started to climb. Dean gave him some aspirin and put him to bed, but he kept shivering. Dean sat beside him, carding his fingers through his brother’s sweaty hair and trying to figure out his next move.

“Damn it, Sammy. I don’t know what happened. The fucking spell was supposed to heal you, not send me back in time and make you sick. The spell’s in the bunker, and that’ll be locked tight for years, so what do I now?”

“Dean?” Sam croaked.

“Yeah, Sammy?”

“Stop calling me ‘Sammy.’”

“I hate to tell you, kiddo, but that’s not gonna happen any time soon. I think you need to embrace the inevitable, Sammy.”

“Shut up, jerk.” Sam murmured, closing his eyes.

“Bitch.” Dean whispered back.

*   *   *   *   *

“Come on, Sam. You’ve gotta tell me something!” Dean flipped idly through the books on the table. “Lottery numbers, Super Bowl winners, stock tips, _something_. You’re always bitching about credit card scams. This is the perfect, legal opportunity for us to be set for life!”

“No way, Dean. Most of the time travel we’ve experienced so far seemed to follow the Novikov self-consistency principal, or possibly Greenberger and Svozil’s quantum theory. Even when we thought we changed the past everything worked out so that the present remained constant. But almost all of our experiences were with . . . things I can’t talk about. And in our one experience that didn’t involve–uh– _things_ , it was a one-way trip from the past to the present, so no help there. We have no way of knowing what’ll happen if you learn stuff now and then go back and change the past. We need to limit your exposure to the present to minimize the chances of a paradox.”

“Uh-huh. I didn’t think it was humanly possible for you to get nerdier. Guess I was wrong. Can you try that again, in English?”

Sam sighed. “So far time travel has worked like in ‘12 Monkeys’ or ‘Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure’, but I’m worried it could turn into ‘The Butterfly Effect’.”

“Oh. Why didn’t you just say that in the first place?” Dean wandered over and picked up the sword, shaking his head. “God, that movie was terrible. Two hours of my life I will never get back. You know what was even worse, though? ‘A Sound of Thunder’. Totally fucked up the Bradbury source material. What kind of egotistical punk reads Bradbury and thinks, ‘Meh. I can do better.’?”

“Dean!”

“What? I’d help, but you won’t let me near a computer. It’s not like I can read ancient Urdu or whatever-the-hell that is.”

“It’s Yoruba, Dean. I can’t read it either; thank God for Google Translate.”

“Google what now?”

“Never mind. Huh. It looks like the authors of the book didn’t speak Yoruba either, and didn’t have technology to make up the difference. The English notes say the spell lets an ailing warrior access cosmic energies to regain his full strength. I’m pretty sure that’s bullshit, though, because the translation sounds like the strength is taken from the warrior’s past self. That cross-temporal linkage could explain why the spell switched you with my Dean when he stepped onto the sigil. Fascinating. The good news is that the appendix has more detailed notes in the original Yoruba, and this spellwork looks similar to an Igbo text that I was looking through a few months back. If I cross-reference the two I’m pretty sure I can cobble together a counter-spell.” He strode across the room and was flipping through books before he’d finished talking.

Dean called after him, “Oh. Good. That sounds great. I’ll just, uh, wait here and play with my sword.”

Sam stopped and turned around. “Shit. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to leave you hanging. I just thought . . .”

“Dude. Don’t worry about it,” Dean reassured him, waving his hands. “I’m not a house guest that needs entertained; I just wanted a moment to acknowledge my pain. Go, Geek-boy. Research like the wind.”

Sam rolled his eyes and tried to bite back a smile.

*   *   *   *   *

In the end, the reversal spell was fairly simple: a modified sigil, more burning ingredients, and a hodgepodge incantation. With a blinding flash of light everyone was back where–and when–they belonged.

“So. That was weird.”

“Yup.”

“You learn anything interesting from future me, Sammy?”

“Just that you’ll still be calling me ‘Sammy’ when I’m thirty-two.”

“Dude, I’ll be calling you ‘Sammy’ when you’re one hundred and two. That’s a promise.”

*   *   *   *   *

 “Well, that was a bust. The only thing worse than seeing you suffer the effects of these trials was seeing the same thing happen to your twenty-two-year-old self.”

“I appreciate the attempt Dean, I really do. But I think this is one of those situations where the only way out is through. We’ve just got to figure out this last trial and make it happen. I couldn’t do that to my past self anyway. That poor kid has enough shit coming his way without us adding to it.” Sam smirked at his brother. “Aside from everything else, he’s stuck with you for most of the next decade.”

“Ha ha. Very funny, bitch.” Dean wrapped a blanket around his brother’s shoulders in a movement that only superficially resembled a hug.

“Jerk.” Sam closed his eyes and leaned into the motion, just for a moment.

**Author's Note:**

> *Approximate translation of the spell:
> 
> When I was young I had strength and health.  
> Now I need that strength again.  
> Now my body is sick and weak.  
> Now I need that strength again.  
> Let me borrow from the past.  
> Make the trade. Make the trade. Make the trade.
> 
> My apologies for any translation errors. I really did use Google translate. This bears no relation to Yoruba tradition or culture. I wanted a language that could be written in the Latin alphabet but that would be plausible for neither Sam nor the Men of Letters to speak, and I have a personal fondness for Yoruba.


End file.
